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concertina226 writes "Called the Raspberry Pi 'hack day', the competition will pit 100 entrants against one another in a number of categories using only the board, Internet access, soldering irons and as much coding as they think appropriate. Participants will have 24-hours to complete projects, at the end of which winners will be awarded from a variety of prizes including camcorders, Android tablets and the geek must-have, the Hubsan H107 Quadcopter."

Not true - only one supplier has been that incompetent, and that one will wake up and ship if you cancel the order. There are plenty of alternative suppliers that promise 1-week delivery, and actually achieve faster than that.
There's a factory in Wales producing 16,000 units a week, and the Foundation reckons they will have shipped 1 million units this year (the original target was 100,000)..
As for what people are doing with it, you are rather behind, shipmate. Read the Foundation blog http://www.raspbe [raspberrypi.org]

Show us someone who has them in stock and shipping the same day, and for less money than it costs me to ship a fucking toaster oven. I can order pretty much anything I want (keyboards, motherboards, whatever) straight outta China with free shipping, but it costs fifteen bucks to ship something the size of a deck of cards from the UK to the US? That is pure bullshit, and fuck them in their greedy ears for charging so much. If they can't find people in the UK willing to work for a reasonable wage and able to

In short, you're spending too much time whining and not enough time shopping around. Feel free to buy one of the many competitive products out there. I suspect your entitlement mentality may hit a brick wall

A quick search on the pi forums finds a US user with the following experience:

The plural of anecdote is not data. A quick search on the pi forums will find US users with the opposite experience ordering from the same vendor. Great, neither of us have proven anything.

My hate is not for the computer. In fact, I have no real hate. But I dislike being lured in to the early adopter group — I didn't order one until after they announced they had Android 4 running, which they still haven't released for whatever reason. Originally they said there were problems with sound and networking,

As I've said in other threads on this subject: cancel your order with RS, go with Farnells. I just received my second, rev 2.0 board. My first (rev 1) Pi is running the home PBX quite happily using IncrediblePBX. The second one was ordered on 2012-11-06 and arrived on 2012-11-20.

Adding my own to the experiences mentioned above — I live in Mexico. My Raspberry took just over a week to arrive home. Yes, I had originally ordered one when everybody rushed to them, and then cancelled as it seemed it would never arrive, but as soon as the eager hackers got their hands on the first run of boards, it got easier for the rest of us.

The Pi has GPIO pins. You can control almost any electronic device that you can build or modify or connect to during the competition. Personally, I would use a breadboard, but that's because I am absolutely crap at soldering.

Last story I was referred to there was about 'Microsoft created web page to convert iOS apps to Windows' except done in such a way that I had 3 different slightly less technical people at my company ask me why I hadn't run our app through this 'automated conversion' page...

They were referring to some MSDN documentation. Actually, it was more like a sales pitch on how awesome Surface is that just happened to be under msdn.microsoft.com

I can't speak for myself but it's the jerking around that I don't appreciate. This will be done this time, no wait, it'll be done that time. We have Android for you, oh but we're not going to release it and we won't explain why. Guess what? People who ordered two days later than you got twice as much RAM, which we clearly knew about for quite some time because these things don't happen overnight, but rather than discount the obsolete part we'll just ignore the whole situation. So much for Openness of the process, there is none. Also, claiming the entire driver stack is free from end to end when it isn't. (I have previously posted about being glad they opened up the driver stubs but that still doesn't make it the complete driver source. And no I'm not interested in hearing about how nobody else opens their blob either, because this is about the claim to a fully-open driver.) And let us not even get into the drastically incompetent shipping nightmares. What I learned from this is to avoid both RS and Farnell like the plagues they are because they are not competent to put something in a box and send it to a customer. Hell, Farnell will even defraud you about backstock and shipping, at least they did me.

We're a cynical bunch, and R-Pi has done nothing to change that. Indeed, it has only served to further cement the high value of cynicism. If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.

My next ARM computer will probably be a pogoplug. And hey, they have GPIO too:p

Farnell seem perfectly competent to me, I've been a customer for several years and I've never felt "defrauded" and all my orders have arrived when they said they would arrive.

The foundation are stuck between a rock and a hard place on the improvements issue. Since they are a non profit they don't have much wiggle room - to preannounce significant upgrades would be to do an Osbourne and potentially suffer an existential threat as people stop buying waiting for the new device.

The foundation are stuck between a rock and a hard place on the improvements issue. Since they are a non profit they don't have much wiggle room - to preannounce significant upgrades would be to do an Osbourne and potentially suffer an existential threat as people stop buying waiting for the new device.

I understand why they did it, but that doesn't change the fact that the process is not really Open, to the detriment of customers. Thus, I choose not to be a customer any more, at least until they have their process and problems ironed out and the hardware has settled in a single configuration and they're not creating data corruption bugs in the firmware and so on. And by the time, it's not unlikely that something better for my needs will be on the market at about the same price anyway.

I understand why they did it, but that doesn't change the fact that the process is not really Open, to the detriment of customers.

It's _not_ Open. They're not claiming it is. That's not their purpose. They wanted to make an extremely affordable development platform to promote computer education esp. in schools, and that's exactly what they did.They are releasing as much info/code/APIs as they can, so at a first glance it *looks* like it's an open source project... it's not. They'll be the first ones to poin

"Because our remit is education in the broadest sense, we wanted â" needed â" to provide completely open access to the hardware."

You provided a one line quote from a broader article in which Pete Lomas explains some of the background to why they couldn't take the fully open route, but did release all that they could. I don't think an article of this sort, written around September of this year, counts as "claiming that the Raspberry is open".

Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard. They wanted and needed to provide open access but they couldn't. They don't claim the Pi is open and they're frank about the reasons why they can't make that claim.

It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.

Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard.

The quote refers to something that was eventually done, so what else could have been meant other than "completely open access to the hardware" was ultimately achieved? Especially considering that this article wasn't the last time someone connected with the Raspberry Pi Foundation has made this sort of misleading claim, see http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 [raspberrypi.org]

It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.

What makes you think I care? Whether or not the Raspberry Pi is open isn't something that particularly interests me. But claiming it is when it

Farnell seem perfectly competent to me, I've been a customer for several years and I've never felt "defrauded" and all my orders have arrived when they said they would arrive.

Farnell is showing warehouse stock when they have none. The orders are fulfilled from a separate warehouse and they don't actually have up-to-date stock information on it. Second, they sat on my order for a week after I was charged and before shipping. Third, they claimed I would get air shipping for the price of ground since I had to wait, and I got ground shipping for the price of ground, which is bait and switch (only because they claimed I would get better shipping, wh

I ordered mine from Farnell in August hoping it would arrive in time for the mid-winter hacking season and it arrived on my doorstep the very next day. This in Ireland, a place most Amazon and UK Ebay sellers won't ship to because of the random and untrackable variations in its postal system, no post codes and addresses such as "O'Leary's Farm, County Donegal."

IMHO the reason many Slashdotters are hostile to the Pi is that many Slashdotters are based in the US, a country that hasn't been high on the Pi's priority list. Keep in mind that while the Raspberry Pi is great for us grown-up hackers, it was intended primarily for school kids in the UK. So get to the back of the queue/line or build your own.

Well, I ordered mine in (early) July, and I still dont have it (via RS).I complained, and got told dates it would definitely ship, 3 times, which never got hit.I got sent a 'congratulations, you have been upgraded to 512MB of ram, lucky you!' email that happened to mention I could cancel it any time before I got a shipping confirmation email.I filled out the cancel order form, and got an immediate email claiming I could not cancel it as it had been forwarded to shipping.I replied saying I had got no confirm

I ordered because they said they had stock in hand. They sat on the order for a week, charged my card, and sat on it for another week, then shipped it ground when they promised to ship it air.

People will moan about anything though - if they paid for 256MB RAM, and they got 256MB RAM, they should be happy. The fact it's been raised, for no extra cost, to 512MB is irrelevent

No, it's entirely relevant. The fact is that the development process is not open. If it were open, they'd have told people that a new version was coming, and people who could benefit from more RAM could have waited. They didn't, so they couldn't. And it's relevant because now official projects will increasingly target

Look, if you paid for aboard with 256MB and were lucky enough to receive one with 512MB, that's a bonus. If you "only" got the exact thing you paid for, fully knowing what you were paying for, what the hell are you griping about? You're obviously not the target audience if you let something as trivial as this upset you. You're the kind of moaning, entitled whiner who brings projects down with constant nit-picking and negativity. Go away and start your own project; really, people like you are not really welc

If I were smarter, I would have waited to buy an R-Pi. Early adopters get screwed around (if not actually screwed) and I forgot that to my detriment.

You probably should have done. The RPi is still effectively a beta product. I've not been following all that closely, so I don't know how explicit they've been on that. But it was definitely the sense I got: this was a way to find and iron out design issues, and for the community building an education platform to get working on.

If you happen to have a use for it that's outside that scope, then great. But it's a bonus.

Re the memory upgrade... if you ordered a 256MB unit and get a 256MB unit, what's the problem? I mean, I understand why it's kind of frustrating... but, really, it's not that big a deal is it? I mean, it's cheap to start off with, and if that really much a problem you could just order the new 512MB one and eBay the old one... demand is still sufficiently high that you should get a good price for it.

When I hear the term "developer board" I think of a board suitable for doing development work on, i.e. something reliable, not a board that is undergoing development, i.e. a prototype, which is what the Raspberry Pi actually feels like. It was certainly not meant to be this way though, the Raspberry Pi went through a prior beta phase which was meant to iron out the last remaining bugs before the final version of the board was created for mass production. Clearly they failed to achieve this goal.

Sounds like you either have shoddy supporting hardware, or you really don't know what you're doing.

I wouldn't say/. as a whole is hostile towards it, but I personally think RPi is a fad, just like Arduino. Real programmers have had their embedded hardware for decades, and the idea of their special toys becoming too mainstream can be intimidating. Of course, Real Men design their own hardware with FPGAs, instead of running someone else's CPUs;)

One particular gripe with RPi is the hypocrisy of being marketed as "open", but the graphics side is still a closed blob. I'm not sure you can ever satisfy the

But it's not marketed as "open". Indeed, they go to pains to explain there are parts that will never be "open" in their FAQ. However, they do publish schematics and they do publish information and have a support forum for using the "bare metal", so it's more open than your typical PC. But it never has been marketed as "open", it's only ever been marketed as "affordable and easily programmable".

Good point -- I guess I'd been too focused on the hype and discussions, rather than official announcements. Nevertheless, the lack of openness seems to be a key problem for many who expect this sort of hobbyist hardware to be more open.

It's like holding an auto race when there were only 2 automobiles existing in the world.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of the pi, but as I enter the second month of waiting for it to show up I'm not all that certain it is not just vaporware . . .

Also, if you are waiting 2 months, perhaps you should order it from somewhere else. I ordered one and it arrived a week later. And that was only last month.

If you read reports it's clear that people in the same country ordering from the same vendor are getting their units on vastly differing time scales. And "from somewhere else"? there are 2 options, and both suck.

I ordered mine from farnell (elements24 now?) a few days ago. I live in New Zealand. New-bumfuck-Zealand. Nothing ever arrives here quickly as we're literally in the middle of nowhere. And guess what? I got it next day. And they didn't even charge my credit card until a day AFTER I got it.

It actually came from New South Wales, Australia. Apparantly they have 100s and 100s in stock. Maybe there are shortages elsewhere, I don't know, but Aussies

Element14 in.au still sell out, but they've been getting new stock in every 10 days or so. I ordered mine (together with a few other unrelated parts) a couple of days after element14 emailed me to say they had stock... by which time they were out of stock (this was early November)

The unrelated parts arrived in two days, and the Raspberry Pi and its case arrived about a week later, a day or two after element14 got them in stock, and a day or two _earlier_ than their website's expected delivery time.